The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that their Voting Members have approved the formation of a new Working Group to develop a Recommended Practice to Update Author Name Changes in the Academic Publication Record after Publication as a Result of Identity Change. NISO invites statements of interest to participate in this Working Group.
Being correctly identified as an author associated with any type of publication output is important for many reasons – accountability, funding, precedence, promotion, tenure, and more. This is true for the outputs themselves, for citations, and for third-party indexing of the publication metadata.
However, author names can change for a number of reasons, including deed poll, divorce, gender transition, marriage, remarriage, and pseudonyms, and the information in their published works needs to be in sync with their actual situation in real life.
This Recommended Practice is intended to ensure the widest possible notification and implementation of changes to author names post-publication, including where changes to author names are requested, or required, not to be made public (for example, transgender name changes where the author does not wish to reveal their change to a wide audience). The Working Group will consult with a wide group of stakeholders involved including, but not limited to, authors, publishers, funders, institutions, indexers, databases, Crossref, ORCID, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and more.
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